French revolutionary and Napoleonic warsa series of wars between 1792 and 1815 that ranged France against shifting alliances of other European powers and that produced a brief French hegemony over most of Europe. The revolutionary wars, which may for convenience be held to have been concluded by 1801, were originally undertaken to defend and then to spread the effects of the French Revolution. With Napoleon’s rise to absolute power, France’s aims in war reverted to simple aggrandizement of influence and territory.

Monarchies at war with the French Republic

The overthrow of Louis XVI and the establishment of republican government placed France at odds with the primarily monarchical and dynastic governments of the rest of Europe. In the Declaration of Pillnitz (1791) Austria and Prussia issued a provocative general call to European rulers to assist the French king reestablishing himself in power. France declared war in April 1792. On September 20, 1792, French forces under Charles-François Dumouriez and François-Christophe Kellermann turned back an invading Prussian-Austrian force at Valmy, and by November the French had occupied all of Belgium. Early in 1793 Austria, Prussia, Spain, the United Provinces, and Great Britain formed the first of seven coalitions that would oppose France over the next 23 years. In response to reverses at the hands of the First Coalition, the Revolutionary government declared a levy en masse, by which all Frenchmen were placed at the disposal of the army. By that means unprecedentedly large armies were raised and put in the field during this period. Battles on the Continent in the mid-18th century typically had involved armies of about 60,000 to 70,000 troops, but after 1800 Napoleon routinely maneuvered armies of 250,000; and he invaded Russia in 1812 with some 600,000. (See map.)

The rise of Napoleon

By early 1795 France had defeated the allies on every front and had pushed to Amsterdam, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees; more importantly, Prussia had been forced out of the coalition and had signed a separate peace that held until 1806. In May 1795 the United Provinces of the Netherlands became the French-influenced Batavian Republic. In northern Italy, a strongly positioned French army threatened Austrian-Sardinian positions, but its commander proved reluctant to move. In March 1796 he was replaced by a more dynamic general, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon executed a brilliant campaign of maneuver against Austrian and Sardinian forces in Italy and in the resultant treaty of Campo Formio forced Austria to cede the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium and Luxembourg), which became the first territorial additions to the French Republic, and to recognize the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics established by French power in northern Italy.

Napoleon’s next campaign was a major failure. He sailed an army to Egypt in May 1798 with the idea of conquering the Ottoman Empire. The defeat of a French naval squadron by Admiral Horatio Nelson in the Battle of the Nile (August 1, 1798) left him without sufficient naval support, however, and, after failing to take Acre in 1799, Napoleon withdrew to France. His army continued to occupy Egypt until 1801. Meanwhile, other French forces had occupied new territories and established republican regimes in Rome, Switzerland (the Helvetic Republic), and the Italian Piedmont (the Parthenopean). As a result the Second Coalition formed, comprising Britain, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Naples, Portugal, and Austria. The allies’ initial successes were reversed by their inability to agree on strategy, however, and by the time Napoleon became the first consul of France by the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, year VIII (November 9, 1799), the danger of foreign intervention against the Revolution in France was over. A victory over Austria at Marengo in 1800 and the consequent Treaty of Lunéville left France the dominant power on the Continent. For two years thereafter only Great Britain, with its powerful navy, remained to oppose Napoleon. Nelson’s smashing victory at Trafalgar (October 21, 1805) ended a French threat to invade England. In 1805 a Third Coalition formed with Britain, Russia, and Austria. Napoleon won major victories at Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805 and at Jena, Auerstädt, and Lübeck over the new coalition member Prussia in 1806. The resulting Treaty of Tilsit, in which Prussia was halved at the Elbe and also lost part of Poland, and the Treaty of Schönbrunn in 1809, following a brief Austrian uprising, left all of Europe from the English Channel to the Russian border, with the exceptions of Portugal, Sweden, Sardinia, and Sicily, either part of the French Empire, under the control of France, or allied to France by treaty.

In 1806, in an attempt to use French control of continental ports to blockade Britain indirectly, Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree, by which ships passing to French-controlled ports after calling at British ports were liable to seizure. The Continental System, as this policy was called, was not successful. The general inhibition of European trade that ensued (for Britain responded with a like policy of detaining ships bound for French ports) and the perceived favouritism in the French government’s granting of licenses to French merchants for trade with Britain cost Napoleon considerable political support. Meanwhile, though pressed at home, the British were able to expand their colonial markets so as to emerge from the trade war more prosperous than before.

The defeat of Napoleon

Napoleon’s military successes resulted from a strategy of moving armies rapidly and striking quickly, sometimes by surprise, often so as to prevent the coordination of the forces opposing him, which he was then able to defeat piecemeal. This strategy necessitated a thorough knowledge of the terrain of the theatre of war, especially as quick movement precluded adequate supplying of his armies without a large amount of requisitioning in the area of operations. The answer to this strategy for Napoleon’s enemies was to maintain a threat while avoiding engagements until coordination could be achieved; relying on strong lines of supply, allied armies could await opportunity while Napoleon’s troops, chasing them, began to suffer from overextension of their supply lines. This strategy was used first in the Peninsular Campaign of 1811 by the duke of Wellington, who was able to open up Spain using supply lines through Portugal. It was used most dramatically by the Russian generals M.B. Barclay de Tolly and P.I. Bagration in their response to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812; they simply withdrew along parallel lines. Unable to win a decisive victory at Borodino on September 7, the only full-scale engagement of the campaign, Napoleon was eventually forced to retreat. The Russian armies then turned to pursuit; Napoleon was forced to march his army back along the same route he had come, now depleted of forage, through the Russian winter in which temperatures reached −30 °F (−35 °C). In this disastrous campaign, Napoleon lost 500,000 men, the faith of his allies, and the awe of his enemies.

A new coalition, formed in 1813, mustered armies that at last outnumbered those of France. Napoleon’s allies fell away one by one, and by late 1813 he had been forced to withdraw west of the Rhine. An invasion of France commenced early in 1814; Paris was reached in March, and on April 6 Napoleon abdicated. His exile to the island of Elba lasted less than a year, however, and in March 1815 he returned to France and rallied a new army. A seventh and final coalition of Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria opposed him. The campaign was brief. Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo on June 16–18, 1815, was again decided upon the issue of his inability to surprise and to prevent the joining up of two armies invading France along separate lines, in this case Wellington’s Dutch and English troops and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher’s Prussians. Napoleon abdicated on June 22, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII shortly thereafter.